tractors

In a recent Hutchinson News editorial, Jim Schinstock considered the advances in technology it took for a Kansas farmboy to sit in a swivel chair and stare at a computer screen. As he ponders his swivel chair, he realizes it, too, was invented by a farmboy of sorts—though the man lived in Virginia 200 years ago. The inventor’s name was Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson didn’t just come up with new chair technology.

Buying a new farm tractor costs almost as much as a new home in a decent suburb.

Shelling out $200,000 or more for shiny new John Deere, Case IH, New Holland or other name brand horsepower to work the fields of a 21st century Midwestern farm isn’t unusual, farmers and dealers say.

What seems more unusual, to newcomers to farm economics at least, is that those shiny new models aren’t the hottest selling big iron on many dealers’ lots. That would be the used tractors that were traded in when the new models rolled off the dealers’ flatbed trucks.